Sunday, October 31, 2010

I was really surprised that a lot of people don't like Nagios, but still using it and in many cases alternatives were not even considered ...
For the ones who'd like to check other solutions - I'd recommend to start withXymon and OpenNMS

Xymon - Very fast deployment, agents available for any UNIX platform and win32. Scalable to thousands hosts. Easy to write or customize test scripts.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

NexentaStor community edition has some limitations on the iSCSI configurations (GUI or CLI interface)

Most of them can be addressed without switching to alternative solution or to the Enterprise edition, especially if the storage is already in use and downtime better be avoided.

Here is an example on the setup of iSCSI volume shared between 2 hosts.
It can be used for clustered file system or as a volume for Oracle database (ready for a RAC implementation).
Obviously, you can apply similar rules for different scenarios and network topologies.

Storage network topology:

In my setup both Host1 and Host2 are running Solaris 10.
Two fully independent switches were used to provide redundancy and additional throughput.